The present disclosure broadly relates to the art of printing systems and, more particularly, to a user interface and printing system for processing print jobs, as well as a method of processing print jobs.
The terms “print”, “printing” and “marking” as used herein are to be broadly interpreted to encompass any action or process involving the production or output of sheet media having text, images, graphics and/or other indicia formed thereon by any process, such as inkjet or electrophotographic processes, for example. The terms “printer” and “printing system” as used here are to be broadly interpreted to encompass any device, apparatus or system that is capable of performing a “printing” action. Examples of such equipment and/or systems include, without limitation, desktop printers, network printers, stand-alone copiers, multi-function printer/copier/facsimile devices, and high-speed printing/publishing systems. Additionally, such exemplary embodiments of equipment, systems and/or processes can utilize sheet media of any type or kind, such as paper, cardstock and/or polymeric film, for example. Furthermore, such exemplary equipment, systems and/or processes can output indicia on such sheet media using any printing or marking substance, such, as ink, toner and/or colorant, for example, in monochrome (e.g., black) or one or more colors, or any combination thereof.
It is often desirable to produce packs of printed materials that include multiple documents which are printed on one or more different kinds of sheet media (e.g., white paper, colored paper and transparencies). Commonly, the various documents are also subjected to different finishing operations (e.g., stapling, hole punching, binding, insertion of separator sheets and offset stacking). Currently, the options available for producing such packs of printed materials are somewhat limited and normally include a substantial amount of manual sorting and/or other handling. As such, organizing these packages of materials is typically time consuming and can often be quite costly. What's more, the significant amount of manual sorting that is normally involved can lead to errors and/or omissions, such as including two copies of one print job in a pack of materials and/or omitting a copy of another print job from the pack, for example.
An example of such a manual sorting arrangement is shown in FIG. 8, which illustrates a plurality of stacks of printed documents 10, 12, 14, 16 and 18. Stacks 10, 14 and 18 respectively include four copies of print jobs J1, J3 and J5. Stacks 12 and 16 respectively include three copies of print jobs J2 and J4. Jobs J1 and J4 respectively of stacks 10 and 16 are shown using the same continuous line type, which can optionally be considered to be of the same type or kind of sheet media, such as standard white paper, for example. The term “custom media” shown on print jobs J2, J3 and J5 respectively in stacks 12, 14 and 18 are so labeled merely to indicate that the same are of a different media type than jobs J1 and J4, such as being on colored paper or transparencies, for example. Additionally, jobs J2, J3 and J4 are shown using line types, which can optionally be considered to be of different media types.
The stacks of print jobs are then manually collated or otherwise organized into two complete copies of bundle B1, one copy of bundle B2 and one copy of bundle B3. One example of a situation in which such bundles or packs of materials might be prepared is a business management meeting, where the documents represented by print jobs J2 and J4 are specific to particular business units. In such a case, it may be desirable to limit distribution of the materials to those for whom the information would be relevant. This may be done to minimize the distribution of sensitive information, or for other reasons. Also, it will be appreciated that the numbers of print jobs and bundles shown in FIG. 8 is merely exemplary, and that in most cases, tens or hundreds of copies of each bundle may be produced. In such a scenario, significant cost savings can be achieved by, wherever possible, reducing the number of jobs that are printed. Thus, it would be beneficial to collate and organize the bundles so that print jobs J2 and J4 are omitted from bundles B2 and B3. Using known techniques, however, it may be determined that the expense in time and manual effort associated with printing, sorting and bundling the materials in different ways for different groups of people would offset any reduction in material costs that might be realized by using job specific collation. Thus, the full pack of documents may be unnecessarily produced for each person rather than commit the resources to performing the job specific collation.
In an effort to minimize the manual work associated with the production of packs of documents of this nature, systems have been developed that permit numerous print jobs to be combined or merged together into a single, large print job. This single, large print job can then be sent to a printing system resulting in the output of the numerous documents as a single stack of materials, which can then be repeated as many times as necessary.
Such systems have met with success in certain applications and environments. However, these systems exhibit characteristics that may, in other situations, inhibit the adoption and use of the systems. One such characteristic is that the identities of the individual print jobs are normally lost when the same are merged together into the single, large print job. This is disadvantageous because it leaves the user or operator to keep track of which pages are part of each job. Thus, to insert a separator sheet between two jobs, the user would have to know or determine which two sheets to insert the separator sheet between. Furthermore, reducing the numerous print jobs to a single print job prevents job specific attributes from being maintained. Thus, the resulting large print job is normally edited on a page-by-page basis rather than on a job-by-job basis.